Three friends from the Orbit-5 colony discover that their school drones are disappearing at night, and their search leads them toward a strange mystery hidden in the dark.
On Orbit-5, a colony hanging in the shadow of Saturn’s rings, nothing worked quite like it did on Earth. Students wore rocket boots between classes, lunch came in glowing energy jellies, and the windows showed a sky full of slow-turning gold dust. But Len, Ada, and Tilo cared most about programming hour, when each class got its own fleet of drones to test, race, and tinker with.
The three fifth-graders were not supposed to boast about it, but everyone knew they were the best drone pilots in school. Len was quick with a fix, Ada noticed details nobody else saw, and Tilo could build a clever shortcut out of almost anything.
So when they walked into the computer lab one morning, Len stopped so fast his boots tapped the floor. The long table where their drones were usually lined up was bare.
He blinked at it, then at the shelf above it, then at the empty charging dock. “Where are they?” he asked.
Ada’s face tightened. “They were here last night.” She crossed to the table and ran her fingers over the polished surface. Only a few screws and a broken propeller remained.
Tilo crouched at once. On the floor, near the corner of the room, pale scrape marks curved toward the door. They were narrow and uneven, as if something heavy had been dragged away in a hurry.
“Maybe someone’s messing with us,” he said, though his voice had lost its usual grin.
Ada was already at the service terminal. Her eyes moved quickly over the glowing lines of data. “No alarms were triggered,” she said. “And the last movement from our drones was at 03:17.”
Len frowned. “That’s weird. The school shuts down at 02:00.”
“Exactly.” Ada tapped the screen again. “Security should have caught something. It caught nothing.”
By break time, the mystery had spread across half the school. Two drones from another class had vanished too. Then three more. The teachers were annoyed, the younger students were frightened, and the robot cleaner kept swivelling its round silver head a little too fast whenever anyone mentioned the missing machines.
Len noticed that too. “It’s acting strange,” he muttered.
Ada looked up. The cleaner’s single blue eye flashed once, then twice. “Strange how?”
Tilo leaned closer. “Like it knows something.”
No one had any answers by evening, when the colony shifted into night mode and the corridors dimmed to a soft blue glow. Most of the school went quiet. The only sounds were the hum of vents and the faraway tick of cooling pipes.
That was when Len made his choice.
“We wait,” he whispered. “In the lab. If the drones are being taken, we’ll see who’s doing it.”
Ada didn’t like the idea, but she brought a blanket anyway and tucked herself beside the server room door. Tilo carried an ultraviolet torch and the motion detector he had built for a science fair. Len watched the hall through a thin crack in the curtain, his stomach turning each time the lights pulsed.
03:15.
The corridor outside flickered once, then went dark.
A soft metallic clink came from just beyond the lab door. Something moved slowly across the floor, scraping lightly, then stopped.
Tilo’s detector gave a sharp red blink.
Three shadows slipped past the narrow window in the door. They were small, fast, and far too smooth to be human. In one silent motion, they climbed the wall, skimmed across the ceiling, and vanished toward the locked storage room at the end of the corridor.
Len’s mouth went dry. “Those can’t be students,” he whispered.
The storage room door clicked open without a sound.
The three friends looked at one another, then stood up as one, careful not to breathe too loudly. Ada gripped her torch. Tilo checked the detector. Len pushed the lab door open just enough to slip through.
The storage room was dark, but not empty.
Something inside was glowing.